Did the virus leak out of a lab in China?

At the center of today's major foreign policy conflict stands Wuhan's Institute of Virology. It is one of the world's leading institutions for research on coronavirus and bats.

Principal is the world famous virologist Zheng-Li Shi. It was she who first showed that sars-cov2, which causes covid19, is really derived from bats.

Washington Post writer Josh Rogin has read two-year-old intelligence reports that talk about major security risks at Wuhan's Institute of Virology and he wrote about it in mid-April.

These are risk factors that make it possible to assume that the virus may have accidentally leaked, he claims.

In January 2019, two diplomats visited Wuhan's Institute of Virology and reported a lack of trained technicians to conduct operations in the high-risk laboratory. Josh Rogin cites the report he has been given access to:

“The researchers showed us how different sars-like coronaviruses could interact with ACE2, which is the human receptor that is susceptible to sars-corona virus. It shows that there are SARS-like bats from bats that can spread to humans and cause SARS-like diseases. "

The lab was new and received guidance from laboratories in the United States, but the diplomats suggested that the United States provide additional support to the laboratory, which was ignored by the US leadership.

There have been leaks of dangerous disease viruses from high-security laboratories before, in Russia, Europe and the United States. But how can we know that it has happened in Wuhan now?

- I see it as very unlikely. This research is conducted under rigorous conditions. The purpose is to look for new viruses that have the potential to spread, in order to prepare and develop vaccines, says Anders Sönnerborg, professor of clinical virology at the Karolinska Institute.

He has scientific collaborations with the director Zheng-Li Shi. She is known as the "bat woman" and has collected bats in caves from different parts of China, including in a cave in Yunnan province where she identified a SARS-like coronavirus in the bat species Rhinolophus sinicus .

That virus is 96 percent similar to today's sars-cov2 virus and you know that people have been exposed to it.

- China is a densely populated country and humans come further into nature and closer to the wild animals, then the risk of infection increases. It is believed that people living near this bat cave in Yunnan have antibodies to sars-cov, says Anders Sönnerborg.

There is thus a simple explanation of how sars-cov2 may have spread to humans in a natural way. But US journalist Josh Rogin believes he has further evidence that there is reason to suspect that the virus has spread from the Wuhan lab, namely the Communist Party's actions.

He claims that China is reluctant to share information about the origin of the virus and that Western scientists are not allowed to take part in isolated viruses from the very first infected. But what can it really show?

- If we see the first virus, we can count back and find out when it was first isolated, says Björn Olsen, professor of infectious diseases at Uppsala University.

The virus has a molecular clock. It mutates at a rate that can be calculated in the number of changes per unit of time. And if you find and analyze the very first virus in a person, you can calculate when that person was infected.

"If it turns out to be in July or August last year, we can see that China has been lying about when they first found the virus in humans," he says.

The first genetic code of sars-cov2 was published on January 7 this year. If there are still previously isolated viruses we can not know. The question is how to find out.

- It is not in the nature of the Communist Party to be transparent. It is part of their policy that the outside world should not know what is true. In this case, it harms China because it casts doubt on their actions in this crisis, says Oscar Almén, a China analyst at the Total Defense Research Institute FOI.